Abstract:
On November 13, the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) ordered all outbound flights at airports across the United States to be temporarily suspended due to communication problems at multiple air traffic control centers. The grounding order lasted for about 5 hours and was lifted at 8:15 pm Eastern Time that night; flights gradually resumed, but officials reminded passengers that aircraft, crews and flight arrangements would take time to reconnect. The flight in the air was allowed to land safely.
U.S. Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy said that the failure was related to the old air traffic control system and routers being overwhelmed by a large amount of data. The equipment began to return inconsistent data, so the FAA chose to suspend operations. Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin said new security patches installed in the system appeared to be overloading older routers. CBS quoted multiple sources as saying that an update to the dedicated communications network connected to the U.S. air traffic control system triggered a system restart, which in turn caused a system crash and communications outage; the network is operated by L3Harris.
The FAA stated that the system had been fully tested before the return to flight and confirmed that the operation was stable and reliable. Flight tracking website FlightAware counted more than 10,000 flights delayed and more than 4,000 canceled that day; when the grounding began, about 3,100 planes were flying to U.S. airports. Delays affected Boston, Atlanta, Miami, New York, Los Angeles and other places.
U.S. officials stated that there is currently no indication that the incident involved a cyber attack or other malicious behavior, and also emphasized that the failure had nothing to do with Microsoft's service interruption during the same period. Mullin said that the FAA took the grounding measures out of caution to ensure that aircraft in the air can land safely; Duffy predicted that it will take some time for flights to resume.
The failure once again raised concerns about the aging of U.S. air traffic control infrastructure. The FAA Communications Infrastructure Network is responsible for connecting air traffic control centers and other facilities to transmit critical voice communications and operational data; the network was modernized, operated and managed by the predecessor of Harris Corporation in 2002. A safety review commissioned by the FAA in 2023 has stated that the system relies on outdated time-division multiplexing technology, which is no longer supported by some telecommunications infrastructure. An unexpected failure may cause individual facilities or even entire regional air traffic control centers to be disconnected from the network.
Duffy called on Congress to fund an upgrade to the air traffic control system. Mullin said the Trump administration hopes to replace the existing system as a whole, with an estimated cost of about $50 billion. In January 2023, a system failure in which the FAA notified pilots also led to a brief grounding of flights across the United States; this grounding was one of the largest nationwide flight disruptions in recent years.
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FAA suspends departures from all U.S. airports due to air traffic control communication failure
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